“I have bored you,” I said. I feared it was so.
“You have done anything but.” She went over to the window and opened it. She leaned out and, in her broken voice, howled. When she turned back, her eyes were full of excitement, and she said, “We are both of us wild like the wolf! How glad I am that we found each other!”
I stood. “Come with me to Nohant!”
“Now?”
“Right now. Your run has ended; you have a little time, and I shall take some. Come with me. You can rest, and you can see the very spot where I encountered the wolf.”
She laughed.
“Will you come?”
“Ah, George.”
No, then. Not yet.
March 1820
RUE NEUVE-DES-MATHURINS
PARIS
After my grandmother withdrew me from the convent, she set about trying to find me a husband. It was a dreary process; I was paraded before boors, then made to endure the equally boring process of evaluation.
“Did you not find him handsome?” one of my grandmother’s dowager countess friends breathlessly asked me, of a man I had met the night before.
“To tell the truth, I found him quite ugly.”
The old woman’s hand flew to her breast, her fingers spread out like a fan. “No! It is not true! You cannot have felt that way! He is very handsome, and besides that, he is kind and charming. It is not every day one finds such a prize.”
“If only it were you in need of a companion,” I said, and the woman’s face drew into itself, and she returned to her tea and her cakes.
Eventually, I overhead my grandmother telling someone, “There is no more we can do now. She is, after all, still so young. I shall take her back to Nohant and give her some time. She needs six months, a year.”
Immediately, I felt better, and I met with my mother the next day to talk to her about accompanying us there. “I need your guidance and support in finding a husband,” I told her.
“I need not go with you to Nohant for that,” she said. “It is my right to approve of anyone you are to marry. And whoever it is will need to pass my test, not your grandmother’s. Let me know when you find someone. And then we shall see.”
May 1820
NOHANT
When my grandmother and I returned to Nohant, her condition began to deteriorate. Eventually, she was very weak and oftentimes confused, and I began spending many hours as nursemaid to her.
One night when it was quite late, she asked me to open the shutters to let in the sunshine. “It is nighttime, Grandmama,” I said.
“It is not. Open the shutters.”
“It is nighttime,” I said again, and at this she became nearly hysterical. “Why do you lie to me? I want to see the daylight! Open the shutters at once!”
I stood and said impatiently, “I tell you again it is the middle of the night! I shall prove it to you!” I marched over to the window, flung open the shutters, and stood back triumphantly. For a moment, she lay still, and then she began weeping. She said, “Ah, I am going blind. My God, my God, now I have lost my vision!”
“It is nighttime! Look at the stars!” I said, practically shouting, and then Deschartres came into the room. He had begun sleeping at the house so that he could be on hand if needed. Now he rushed to my grandmother’s side, took her hand, and bent to speak to her in low, soothing tones. He listened intently while she responded to him, words I could not make out as they were so mixed with her sobs, and slurred besides. But he understood her.
“Your grandmother is upset that you have told her it is night, when it is day.”
When I opened my mouth to argue, he said firmly, “Not a word. Bring me candles.”
I gathered together a great number of candles, and he lit them all behind her. The dimness in the room transformed itself into a semblance of daylight.
“Better?” he asked my grandmother.
“Yes, of course. Thank you.”
Deschartres looked at me. I nodded, then took my place back at my grandmother’s bedside.
—
THAT YEAR AT NOHANT, I spent a great deal of time in my room reading whatever I liked. I chose the poets, the moralists, and the philosophers: La Bruyère, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, and Shakespeare. By opening my mind to these many influences, I found myself moving away from some of the convictions I had held at the convent.
As my mind reawakened to the challenges put before me by this reading, Deschartres and I began to have long, philosophical conversations, as well as games of logic that I enjoyed very much. I began to respect him in ways I had not before. As he did me.
Almost as soon as I’d returned to Nohant, Deschartres acted as though I’d already inherited it. He put me in charge of all matters relating to running the house. He kept doing his work on our land and in our gardens, and I was extremely grateful, for despite his ongoing efforts, I had never learned the first thing about husbandry, nor did I want to.
Aware of a new kind of restlessness, though, I added a new routine. Early every morning, dressed in trousers and a white, loose-fitting man’s shirt, I mounted my mare and rode at breakneck speed into the Berry countryside, alone and free. I loved the way the limitless sky opened something in me; I loved the rhythmic sounds of Colette’s hoofs hitting the earth, the short huffs of her breathing. We ran through open fields, and the ground birds rose up before us with a great rustle of flapping wings and high cries.
People in the village began to talk about me in unflattering ways: I rode without a chaperone in men’s clothes; I behaved in unladylike ways, visiting childhood friends and shaking hands boldly with men—no shying away from the press of flesh on flesh. Eventually the rumors fed on themselves and grew into outrageous lies: I had ridden right into the church and up to the altar before turning around and galloping out; I never slept; I was a ghoul who delighted in making medical rounds with Deschartres, where I watched gleefully as he bled people. I was up to no good with a young man Deschartres had employed to help me with my scientific studies. In this last, I must confess that the wagging tongues told the truth.
Not long after I had come back to Nohant, I’d become reacquainted with a friend named Stéphane Ajasson de Grandsagne, who lived nearby. He was very handsome and came from a very good family—not wealthy, because of the great number of children in the family, whose care depleted resources, but aristocratic and very well regarded.
Stéphane was now studying to become a doctor, and I was referred to him to learn something about anatomy and physiology. This was because I wanted to be more active in assisting Deschartres as the town’s de facto surgeon.
So it was that Stéphane began coming regularly to my room to instruct me in the wonders of the human body. Eventually, we moved on to an appreciation of our own structure and function.
Once, I pulled Stéphane onto my bed with me, then on top of me.
“No, Aurore,” he said. “If we were married…” But he knew as well as I that we would never be a sanctioned match. Neither my grandmother nor my mother would ever accept a man as poor as he; and his father would never accept me, because he knew that my mother had been a courtesan.
Then Julie, my grandmother’s maid, told my grandmother that I was behaving inappropriately, and the lessons with Stéphane stopped. I could not bear Julie any malice. She had only told the truth.
February 1833
PARIS
When I told Marie Dorval about Balzac cutting me out of his life, I did not add that I was as dumbfounded as I was hurt. He had befriended Jules and me at the same time, and at first, Jules had not embraced him. He’d shown reservations about the oddities of Balzac’s personality, saying, “He is awfully impulsive!” And I had responded, “One of the reasons I adore him!”
I had loved to listen to Balzac talk with almost sputtering enthusiasm about all the novels he meant to write. I had found him brilliant and very amusing. He had seemed equally enamored of me.
But when Jules and I parted, Balzac slandered me, telling eve
ryone that I was a hypocrite, saying I had lived happily enough in my little love nest with Solange present but that when I broke with Jules, I said it was for the sake of my child. The real reason I left, he said, was because of my love for my editor, Henri Latouche. Of all things! In fact, I had suddenly lost Latouche’s friendship, as well. That man was telling everyone that all of my success had gone to my head. Balzac had warned me that Latouche might drop me if I became what Latouche thought of as too successful, even as had happened with Balzac—and this after Latouche had been Balzac’s biggest champion.
The final insult is that both of them accused me of spreading lies about them.
I took to staying in more and more. For one thing, I did not want to hear whispers as I passed by. But another reason was that I was offered far fewer invitations. I had to develop a new set of friends, and it was slow going.
One who insinuated himself in my life at this time, and whose attentions I gratefully received, was a critic, a twenty-nine-year-old man named Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. He was one of those judges who lamented the fact that he was unable to produce a novel and so called himself without talent, not recognizing that it takes a special talent indeed to be a good critic.
Sainte-Beuve was an appreciator of female sensibilities, and he soon became a close friend. I spoke to him about matters of the heart as much as, if not more than, literature and publishing. Sometimes when he came to dine with me, he brought along Hortense Allart, who was the mistress of René Chateaubriand; and both the critic and I ferreted out details about the old master from one who suffered no compunction about revealing all. Hortense once brought along with her, as if he were an offering to me, Charles Didier, an intelligent and virile man who had been her lover in Florence. I found him attractive, but I saw that he was not at all interested in me. He suggested to Sainte-Beuve, who soon afterward shared it with me, that I would probably be a disappointment in bed, since my demeanor suggested that I was incapable of passion.
Ironically, I was writing about a kind of sexual paralysis in the novel I was working on, called Lélia.
Sainte-Beuve had listened to a number of pages from it, and at hearing one passage had sat in stunned silence. It was this I read him:
Desire, in my case, was an ardor of the spirit which paralyzed the power of the senses even before they had been awakened, a savage ecstasy which took possession of my brain, and became exclusively concentrated there. My blood remained frozen, impotent, and poor, while my will took flight. I had as yet drawn no satisfaction. I fought against these lying urgencies of my suffering, knowing full well that it was not in his power to calm them.
When I finished reading that passage to Sainte-Beuve and he finally opened his mouth to speak, I was afraid he would ask if it was myself I was speaking of. And so I cut him off, saying, “Enough of reading for tonight. Let us turn our conversation to something gay. Have you any gossip for me?”
He raised an eyebrow. Then: “Well, since you ask…” He sat back in his chair, as satisfied as a fat man being served supper, and began.
The next day, though, he sent a note telling me how powerful he had found my reading, and how listening to it had increased his admiration as well as his feelings of friendship for me. He suggested that when Lélia was published, the general public would balk at it, but that “it will raise you high in the estimation of those who see in fiction only a more vivid form of the eternal verities of the human mind. Yours, Madame, is a rare and powerful temperament.” I read his note many times over and kept it in my desk drawer, where it often served to lift me out of a failure of confidence. But as much as I admired, enjoyed, and depended upon Sainte-Beuve, my heart still ached for the loss of my old Berry gang. One night I saw several of them out at Vendanges de Bourgogne, a restaurant where our friend Gustave Papet (whom we had called the “rich mi’lord”) used to treat three or four of us at a time. They were talking and laughing, enjoying themselves immensely over platters of mussels. They did not see me pass by, and I was grateful. Grateful and full of a burning shame.
I buried myself in continuing to work on Lélia, whose heroine went from man to man, because none of them could give her pleasure.
—
MARIE HAD RUSHED TO meet me at the Café de Foy; her face was flushed, her bosom heaving as she sat across from me. I did not speak at first, taken up, as I was, in admiration of her hectic beauty. But then, seeing that something was upsetting her, I asked what it was.
She began speaking rapidly: “I tell you, I will never understand the mystery of love. A woman comes to a man because she wants only him; then she cannot bear the sound of air moving in and out of his nostrils. She cannot bear the sight of his shadow upon the pavement!”
The waiter approached us, and Marie ordered coffee, falling into her coquettish ways for the benefit of the man, who obviously knew who she was. Instead of the nearly sullen indifference he had shown me, he now adopted the fluttery mannerisms of a nervous old woman taking pills with her tea.
When he finally left to fill her order, I said, “You know, Marie, when Balzac was not exhausting himself speaking about his writing or his decorating, he used to go on about how he was an expert in matters of love. And he always said it is easier to be a lover than a husband, because it is harder to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.”
“My distaste is for my lover!” she said, and we both began to laugh loudly, causing many heads to turn in our direction. Marie lifted her chin higher, enjoying the attention.
When her coffee arrived, she stirred sugar into it, staring into my eyes in the wistful way of a little girl. “Tell me, George. Do you think love is only an illusion?”
I hesitated, then said, “I think it is our highest calling. And I think you have perhaps simply not found the right person to whom to give your heart.” My own heart beat like a metronome, as though repeating over and over what I could not say: Choose me, choose me, choose me.
“I don’t mean only romantic love,” she said. “I mean any kind of love. Even love for our children.”
She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “I’m sure you know that rumors are flying around about my daughter, Gabrielle, and me; people are saying that all the while she was growing up, I beat her.”
I nodded. I had heard these rumors, spread by Gabrielle herself, of how abused she had been by her mother, and how Marie was now refusing to give a sou to help Gabrielle’s fiancé, who was very ill. I had heard the rumors, but I knew the truth.
Very soon after meeting Marie, I’d had occasion to spend time alone with her daughter. We’d run into each other on the street in front of a café, and I’d invited Gabrielle to have a coffee with me. I found her to be a very spoiled sixteen-year-old who was extremely jealous of her mother. It is said that a daughter can forgive her mother anything but beauty, and such seemed to be the case. Never mind that Gabrielle herself was beautiful; she preferred to ignore her own gifts in favor of bitterness and blame against the one who wanted only what was best for her.
“My mother would not let me enter the theater, because she was afraid I would outshine her,” Gabrielle told me that day. “And now she won’t give permission for me to marry Antoine Fontaney, because she wants him for herself.”
If Marie did not want her daughter in theater, I thought, it was to spare her the ugly side of being an actress. And I knew that Marie did not want her daughter to marry Fontaney—who used the pen name “Lord Feeling” for the few articles he had published in the Revue des Deux Mondes—because he was actively consumptive. He was very thin, mournful of countenance, and he coughed constantly. Apparently, this was seen by Gabrielle as romantic. He had about him a certain kindness, but his intellect was not great. In addition, the man sought to be an actor when he had no talent whatsoever. Marie could not imagine having to help him get roles just because he was a member of the family, and she was sure that he would ask her to do so—in fact, he had already begun to do so.
So the marriage
prospect that Gabrielle brought to her mother was a man incapable of making money to support himself, never mind a family. He owned nothing, and he would be yet another mouth that Marie would have to feed. But I had to tread carefully with Gabrielle, so in response to her telling me that her mother wanted Fontaney for herself, I only said, “Do you really think so?”
“Of course. It is apparent to him and to me, both. You have only just met my mother; you haven’t seen how selfish she is, how she thinks only of herself. Why, when I was a very little girl, I was backstage when a piece of scenery fell and broke my leg. My mother did not stop the play. No, she cannot be without the adulation of her fans, and so she continued performing—not only that night, but for the entire run—and she came to see me only between scenes!”
“I wonder if it was because she had to go on working in order to make the money to pay for your care,” I said, knowing that this was true. At the time I met her, Marie Dorval was enjoying a great deal of fame, but she was never wealthy. Always, she struggled to pay the bills; and more than once she had creditors threatening to take her furniture.
“She is not what you think,” Gabrielle said. “You will find out soon enough what an indifferent and careless personality she is.”
I found out precisely the opposite.
Marie flung her cloak back from her shoulders. Beneath it, she was wearing a burgundy silk dress with ruching down the center, and its color was so deep it appeared black at the folds. It made the whiteness of her skin glow like alabaster, like the moon. Her bonnet, gay as always, was burgundy silk, and the crown was decorated with a profusion of flowers. She wore garnet-and-pearl earrings, with a matching necklace. I wondered which man had presented her with these; she had told me she had yet to buy herself jewels.
“I beat her, my daughter says! By God, maybe I should have beaten her! I tell you, Gabrielle wounds me more than any man ever has. What am I meant to feel for her when she treats me this way? Must I love her no matter the cost? I want only to stop her from ruining her life, and she breaks my heart by circulating these vile rumors. And then she accuses me of being vicious!”